It’s hard to know what people who picked up the first issue of The New Yorker, eighty years ago this month, made of the drawing on the cover. The picture is a joke, of course: which is more ephemeral, the dandy or the butterfly? But the picture also seems to be saying something about the magazine itself, and the question is: What? Is the man with the monocle being offered as an image of the New Yorker reader, a cultivated observer of life’s small beauties, or is he being ridiculed as a foppish anachronism? Is it a picture of bemused sophistication or of starchy superciliousness? Did readers identify with the cover, or did they laugh at it?
The message was confusing because the magazine, in those days, was confused. The New Yorker was launched as a gossipy, facetious weekly for in-the-know Manhattanites, a sort of Jazz Age Spy. The cover was drawn by Rea Irvin, the magazine’s first art editor, who also designed the distinctive New Yorker headline type. His character acquired a name, Eustace Tilley, in a series of humor pieces, by Corey Ford, that ran in the magazine during its first year, and that pretended to provide an inside look at the making of The New Yorker in a style that spoofed corporate promotional writing. Ford’s stories were accompanied by illustrations in which Eustace Tilley turns up, like Waldo, in various scenes—for instance, supervising the felling of “specially grown trees to make paper for The New Yorker.”
Ford’s pieces were commissioned so that there would be something to run on pages that advertisers were not buying. Advertisers were not buying because they were not sure what The New Yorker was. Neither were the editors. The second issue ran a mock apology for the first. “There didn’t seem to be much indication of purpose and we felt sort of naked in our apparent aimlessness,” the magazine confessed. It knew its audience, which was educated, reasonably well-off New Yorkers. It just didn’t know how to reach them. Circulation began to drop; by fall, it stood at around twelve thousand, and the publisher nearly pulled out. Then things picked up. Janet Flanner and Lois Long, a fashion writer, joined the magazine, along with the editor Katharine Angell. Advertising deals were signed with Saks and B. Altman department stores. In 1926, E. B. White came aboard, and, a year later, he brought James Thurber along. The knowingness and the name-dropping that characterized the early issues disappeared. And Eustace Tilley has shown up on almost every anniversary cover since.
New Yorker readers have become used to him, but it’s not much clearer eighty years later what he’s supposed to represent. Beginning in 1994, efforts were made to do something to his image, which seems, after all, to have little connection to New York City. (Irvin derived it from an 1834 drawing of a Count D’Orsay, “man of Fashion in Early Victorian Period,” that he found reproduced in the costume section of the Encyclopædia Britannica.) After the manner of contemporary art (also of contemporary advertising), the iconography has been parodied, inverted, subverted, and perverted. The man-butterfly binary has been deconstructed, producing a butterfly staring at a man. Species-centrism has been attacked by dressing a dog in the top hat and collar. There has been a female Tilley, an African-American Tilley, and a punk Tilley. On these pages, we introduce some new post-Irvin Tilleys. For two years, in the late nineteen-nineties, there was no anniversary issue, but now the issue is back, and so is Tilley. There is no getting rid of him. He’s the enigma who came to stay. ♦